Arrow Video: ShawScope Volume 4 (1975 - 1983) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Arrow Video

Arrow Video’s competition with fellow boutique releasing labels Shout Factory and 88 Films in terms of curating and publishing Blu-ray boxed sets of long sought after Hong Kong titles in the realm of Shaw Brothers and ShawScope martial arts action features continues to be like watching tightly kept floodgates violently burst open with dozens of films coming at the home video collector like no tomorrow.  Really, there’s never been anything like it before.  Once hard to see cropped and dubbed Hong Kong martial arts epics are now being officially released in the United States in lovingly restored, pristine looking transfers with lovingly detailed liner notes and comprehensive, informative extras.  Starting in 2021 with ShawScope Volume One followed by Two a year later before taking a two-year hiatus until the unveiling of Three, the ShawScope collections from Arrow Video are in direct rivalry with Shout Factory’s ongoing boxed sets in terms of speed and sheer numbers.  However, Arrow Video just dropped a major release, one of their biggest of the year, with Volume Four of ShawScope.

 
What’s interesting about the fourth volume of the ongoing publishing of Shaw Brothers titles in the west is how the box itself is themed.  Where the first three volumes tended towards martial arts, the wuxia and warfare, volume four is tailored towards something a bit different from what came before in easily the most psychedelic, even psychotronic collection of maximalist excesses firing on many cylinders.  Not all of them work but as you wade through this massive sixteen film collection ranging between 1975 and 1983, some of the more outlandish and eccentric offerings to be found within the ShawScope empire make up quite the multifaceted mind warp beamed through your brain and bloodily out the back of your head, an image among many absurdist gore effects and pyrotechnics more than deliver on.  Moreover, the set includes more than a few films that abandon the ShawScope moniker and widescreen ratio in favor of something a bit more standard and economical.  Oh and there’s room for some meta mashups cribbing everything from Star Wars to Alien to Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well as a kind of proto-Toxic Avenger film to be found here. 

 
Starting out with the celebrated and delightful 1975 tokusatsu homage Super Inframan, probably my very first ShawScope before becoming enmeshed in Arrow Video’s deluxe releases, the first film is a playful classic predating the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers as a kind of spinoff of Kamen Rider the hit Japanese effects heavy series.  With its multicolored fantastical kaleidoscopic cinematography by Japanese cameraman Nishimoto Tadashi of Black Cat Mansion and Come Drink with Me, rousing score by Frankie Chan and playful mixture of heroes and demon monsters from the future, it’s a ‘save the world’ epic featuring future The Killer actor Danny Lee in the suit of a cyborg creation battling all kinds of wacky monsters with the flair of a classically Japanese ‘guy in a suit’ romp.  A frequently imported title (I bought my Chinese Blu-ray years before Arrow started getting into it), it is amazing it took until 2025 to finally officially release this on physical media stateside but it nevertheless starts out the fourth ShawScope volume with a wonderfully psychotronic bang.  Also for the uninitiated, its one of maybe a couple of titles in the set that is suitable for minors.

 
Next in line and a year after Super Inframan, Danny Lee once again finds himself suited up in makeup only this time he’s The Oily Maniac, a cripple taken advantage of by criminals only to commit to a magic spell involving dousing himself with oil and toxic waste to become a hulking monster-superhero vigilante justice server.  A bit of a harder, gorier and more violent companion piece (in theory) to Super Inframan, it serves as the blueprint for what would or wouldn’t become The Toxic Avenger character which also sees a battered and bullied ineffectual nebbish transform into an inhuman creature of superhuman strength thanks to physical immersion in noxious chemicals.  With its breathtaking scope cinematography by Crippled Avengers cameraman Hui-Chi Tsao and wonderfully gory makeup effects work, it furthers the fourth volume’s tendency towards the bizarre and fantastical while also being a crime-revenge saga.

 
Third up is Pao Hsueh-li’s 1977 wuxia The Battle Wizard adapted from Louis Cha’s novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils once again headed by Danny Lee as a prince granted magical powers in a saga involving a snake charmer, a giant red snake and an intense and magical swordfight with a masked woman who will either murder or marry anyone who sees her face.  Featuring characters who fire lasers from their fingers like pistols and a fire breathing wizard and a scene where the hero swallows a poisonous toad so he can become strong enough to rip the arms off of a gorilla, so far The Battle Wizard shows the ShawScope empire ratcheting up the nuttiness and absurdist factor.  Penned by recurring ShawScope screenwriter Ni Kuang, the brisk and short but feverishly energized exercise is gloriously bonkers high camp showing a gradual departure away from the more realistically grounded martial arts films of the past towards something closer to fantasy lore.

 
Fourth and fifth in line are The Oily Maniac director Meng-Hua Ho’s Black Magic from 1975 followed by its sequel film Black Magic 2 made a year later, a pair of sexy, scary and gruesome titles involving voodoo curses, possession and counter-cursing warfare at play.  Starring Ku Feng as Shan Chien-mi, the first film tells of forest magician who for pay will accept tasks to put curses on others and cast evil spells.  Anyone who doesn’t fulfill their monetary end of the bargain will die and dissolve like acid.  Meanwhile a young rich widow/succubus dragon lady Luo Yin (Tien Lie) longs for the affections of Xuo Nuo (Ti Lung) who is about to be married to Chu-ying until Yin approaches the magician and pays for spells to be cast that will make Xuo fall out of love with his fiancée and with her instead.  Worse still, Yin further asks that Chu-ying die from an evil spell, something which Master Fu Yong (Ku Wen-chung) catches wind of before launching a metaphysical supernatural counterattack on the evil Shan Chien-mi.  Initially a triangular quasi-romcom that eventually develops into something more sinister and gross including but not limited to some vomitous methods undertaken in ensuring the spells go through, things get even weirder with the sequel film Black Magic 2 which takes on the form of a zombie outbreak thriller pointing towards spell casting and reusing many of the same cast members.  In the US, it was billed as Revenge of the Zombies and as such with its images of hooded figures and melting faces will remind some of the William Shatner Satanic freakout The Devil’s Rain.

 
Number six starts out a quartet of films by director Kuei Chih-Hung all focused on supernatural spell casting.  As with prior Arrow ShawScope sets, the films are presented in the set out of release order starting with one of three films made in 1980 Bewitched while the next two films actually came before it but such is Arrow.  Anyway the film tells the story of a man named Lam Wai who becomes possessed and murders his own daughter.  Unable to prove his case, a detective investigating it also becomes possessed after Lam tells the story of a trip to Thailand that starts out with a beautiful interlude with a Thai woman only to end in horror when it appears she cast an evil spell on him.  Easily the most disgusting and gruesome film so far in the set featuring a bevy of grisly body horrors including eating maggots and drinking from an urn of chopped up unborn infant body parts and blood.  Upping the ante in terms of repulsing the audience, Bewitched being the first film in the set to ditch the ShawScope moniker in favor of standard 1.85:1 widescreen as opposed to panorama is pretty close to being a surrealist barf-bag movie.

 
The seventh film Hex kicked off an entire trilogy of films all dealing in evil spells and vengeful spirits from beyond the grave possessing the bodies of the living, only over time and the next two films Hex vs. Witchcraft and more successfully with Hex After Hex the premise was taken from its horror roots to a kind of screwball meta comedy end.  In the first Hex a sickly and frail woman named Chan Sau-ying (Ni Tien) is perpetually battered and abused by her boorish drunken husband Chun Yu (Jung Wang) who scares off any and all servants who pass through their home only for a new servant girl named Yi-wah (Szu-Chia Chen) to take pity on the woman and one night helps to drown the man and end her suffering.  However, immediately thereafter she seems to be haunted by the undead spirit of her husband.  The supernatural or something more down to Earth?  Drawing from elements of Onibaba and Ghost of Kasane Swamp in terms of trying to dump criminal evidence into the pond with drastic consequences, illicit scheming lovers and an actual demonic kind of retaliation involving a nudity and black magic laden finale that will stop viewers dead in their tracks, Hex is kind of a knockout of a ShawScope film that is constantly surprising and shape shifting as it nears its hallucinatory and uncomfortably titillating conclusion. 

 
For some reason though, this wasn’t enough for the studio which demanded another Hex film, this time in screwball comedic form with Hex vs. Witchcraft which sees a gambling addict marry a ghost with steadily messy results.  Its unfortunately for me the one dud in the ShawScope set though I understand including it for completion sake.  Two years later, however, the director figured out a way to marry the meta comedy aspects of the previous film with the psychotronic horror elements of the first with the 1982 horror-comedy Hex After Hex.  In the film starring Lan-His Liu and Meng Lo, the film is a movie-within-a-movie parody of sorts that takes place within the ShawScope moviemaking empire itself including some hilarious cribbing of Star Wars with a Darth Vader lookalike that renders men nude with the touch of his lightsaber and at another point a man gets the ShawScope logo branded on his behind as the ShawScope theme plays on the soundtrack.  Mostly though it’s a film about a female ghost who possesses the body of a dead girl trying not only to woo a musclebound stuntman but to try and stir things up behind-closed-doors within the walls of ShawScope also.  More than once, the film stumbles on the studio lot with cameras in full view and there’s a lot of camera winking, but near the end it manages somehow to circle back to a kind of tragicomic horror.

 
Number ten Bat Without Wings by Black Lizard director Yuen Chor veers things back into the wuxia film involving a martial artist with a Gene Simmons and batlike makeup job who attacks, rapes (mercifully never shown) and murders women before dismembering and sending their body parts back to their husbands.  Seemingly invulnerable and able to fly while residing inside a trap laden lair with more than a few multicolored lights coming at the camera, it’s up to a skilled swordsman, the seemingly widowed fiancée of a slain woman and her father to track down and take out the nefarious Bat Without Wings.  Though a bit convoluted like a noir with characters and situations that can be hard to keep up with, the film is so fun to look at and occasionally outlandish that you kind of surrender yourself to the film’s psychotronic wonders.  In one of the more playfully psychedelic and frankly batshit offerings from the director of Super Inframan with 1981’s Bloody Parrot, our eleventh film featuring a supernatural bloody parrot which leads to a parrot brothel, the rules and regulations of the ShawScope movie start hitting the fan in a seemingly nonstop mixture of sword fighting, vampires, autopsies, spells and a demonic nude succubus that will remind some viewers of Ken Russell’s later film The Lair of the White Worm. 

 
Nearing the end of the set with the twelfth film is The Fake Ghost Catchers, a horror comedy wuxia mashup of sorts that came out two years prior to the American film Ghostbusters which nevertheless drops the lines ‘I’m a ghost buster’ and ‘I’m not afraid of any ghosts’.  Prominently starring ShawScope stalwart Sheng Fu involving a gag with a seven starred foot, it’s a buddy comedy involving battling spirits from the underworld.  It’s a fun endeavor that may or may not have influenced one of the biggest film franchises in the world.  Number thirteen’s wuxia romp Demon of the Lute is perhaps my favorite in the set from first time director Lung Yi Sheng, a 1983 mixture of children’s fantasy and the fantastical action thriller.  Aided by a completely playful and sugary sweet electronic score and playful comic book elements, it is the closest film in the fourth volume of ShawScope to the kind of whimsical psychotronic glee of a Nobuhiko Obayashi flick.  From the opening song of animated characters singing to its child martial arts displays, Demon of the Lute is kind of wonderful.

 
Number fourteen Seeding of a Ghost is where things start to really ratchet up the insanity and gross out shock horror factors to untold heights, channeling the practical effects horror driven energies of John Carpenter’s The Thing through the indescribable lunacy of The Manitou.  Violent and gruesome and actually a little disturbing, the film tells a typical Black Magic or Bewitched or Hex kind of story involving a man whose wife is raped and murdered who seeks revenge against the culprits through a necromancer’s spell casting.  Featuring a ghost corpse sex scene (I think?), a demonic baby that violently rips its way out of the woman’s abdomen and more than a few wormy gross outs, it is easily the most extreme shocker horror film in the set.  Meanwhile number fifteen Portrait in Crystal kind of returns to the magical wizardry of the wuxia film involving a crystal sculpture and a rainbow-colored sword.  It’s a wild and colorful endeavor with colorfully striking set pieces and some incredible editing effects that make characters spin or twirl about at superhuman speed and a welcome step back from the freakishness of Seeding of a Ghost.

 
Lastly at number sixteen in the set Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is a truly indescribable and uncategorizable Close Encounters of the Third Kind parody/ripoff which seemingly from scene to scene plays like madcap gonzo comedy invoking the ShawScope meta parodies of Hex After Hex with hallucinatory sensorily overwhelming maximalism.  Basically an alien abduction UFO flick replete with out of nowhere musical numbers that start and stop without much warning, a spaceship that looks like a cross between the Close Encounters mothership crossed with the Millennium Falcon.  Also channeling Marilyn Monroe and specifically The Seven Year Itch which starts a chain reaction car pileup that goes on and on and on, the plot is hard to follow and the tonality is hard to gauge but that’s part of what makes this easily the most insane offering in the whole of ShawScope Vol. 4.  An exercise in futility in trying to describe this thing to someone else, it is truly unapologetically bonkers everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mashup of shit thrown at the wall in the hopes some of it will stick.  Closer to, say, UHF than anything, it is the kind of film which has the genuine capacity to melt your brain out of your ear canals.

 
All the films come with their own separate audio commentaries, housed across nine discs while the tenth bonus disc is stacked with comprehensive extras including a 1972 French TV profile of the ShawScope empire in the process of filmmaking called Hong Kong: The Show of Mister Shaw which fans of Shaw Brothers will give viewers a rare behind-the-scenes look on the set of one of their productions.  Stacked with rarely seen trailers and five new video essays as well as a sixty-page illustrated collector’s booklet, all the films are restored in 2K from the original negatives and are housed in a rectangular hardbound box with each disc receiving its own page in the mediabook box.  Of the ShawScope boxes released so far, this is easily my favorite of them, a no-holds-barred foray into a transitional period in the company’s history where they not only seemed to move away from their scope widescreen moniker but when they started to throw caution to the wind in favor of making some truly unforgettable psychotronic freakouts.  Easily the weirdest and most psychedelic ShawScope box yet, it closes out 2025 for Arrow with what can be characterized as an essential purchase and a great Christmas gift for Hong Kong cinema fans keen on getting the craziest of the crop.

--Andrew Kotwicki